Encouraging Voter Turnout
Local authority elections are coming up this year and one of the big issues everyone's talking about is voter turnout - getting people interested, involved and excited about making their mark and sending in their ballots.
When voter turnout is high, everyone wins - the voters get to have their say about how they're represented, the local authorities get a really strong mandate from their community, and Local Government New Zealand is able to advocate strongly on behalf of councils to central government.
One of the first steps to getting high turnout is to get as many people enrolled as possible. LGNZ have been working with the Electoral Enrolment Centre on ways to spread the word about enrolment and how councils can play a significant part in that.
Especially important is getting new voters and new residents enrolled, and making sure people who have moved house since the last election have their details correctly entered.
We've put our suggestions together into a document which has been sent out to councils and is also available on our website - click here to download it. (pdf)
Once the enrolment process is complete, our next step will be working with councils and other organisations to get the enrolled voters (or at least their pens) to turn out on the big day!
Lawrence Yule
President, Local Government New Zealand
Posted 10 February 2010
